A prescient article received before the tragic events in France this week, suggests three pressing reasons for the European Union to re-establish its role as a peacebuilding instrument in the minds of the general public.

The family of slain Muslim police officer Ahmed Merabet is urging people not to equate Muslims with extremists, following a string of deadly attacks in three days in Paris that left 20 dead and the city reeling.

“It is a war against terrorism, against jihadism, against radical Islam, against everything that is aimed at breaking fraternity, freedom, solidarity… There needs to be a firm message about the values of the republic and of secularism.” French Prime Minister Manuel Valls

Based on this statement alone, it looks like France is about to fall into a Red Queen’s Trap. In this case, an all consuming struggle between an increasingly hollow nation-state and a large and growing population of people unwilling to assimilate. For example: here’s agovernment list and atlas of the 751 “sensitive neighborhoods” like the one below that won’t assimilate.

Freedom of Speech – Zacqary Adam Xeper: The cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo did not deserve to die. As a believer in free speech, I’m now supposed to go beyond that sentiment and lionize them as martyrs, fearlessly expressing themselves and standing up for the principles of freedom. I can’t do it. I will mourn for their deaths but I will not glorify their hate speech.

We are facing a political threat, a totalitarian Islamist threat that manifests in terrorism. Journalists are defending something which is elementary to our democracy: our freedom to breathe and to laugh.

Caroline Fourest worked at Charlie Hebdo when it re-published the cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed. Karima Bennoune interviewed her for openDemocracy on the day of the Paris attacks.

Hayat Boumeddiene, the most wanted female suspect in France now, entered Turkey on January 2, a Turkish prime ministry source told CNN. French daily Le Monde, on the other hand, claimed that Boumedienne went to Istanbul from Madrid on Jan. 2, before going to Syria on Jan. 8

This was a specific attack designed to sow division. We musn’t let it.

The horrific killing of ten journalists and two policemen in Paris on Wednesday has been widely described in the mainstream media as a ‘murderous attack on Western freedoms’, notably freedom of expression and the right to satirise. In response, some bloggers have insisted that the ‘attack had nothing to do with free speech’ but was simply part of the ongoing war between Western governments and jihadists.

Zafer Aknar, editor of Turkey’s satirical weekly Leman, speaks to The Associated Press in Istanbul, Turkey, Friday, Jan. 9, 2015. Aknar and his team are preparing a special tribute edition to their colleagues at Charlie Hebdo, with whom Leman had published two joint issues in 2002. On Wednesday, masked gunmen stormed the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo that caricatured the Prophet Muhammad, killing at least 12 people. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)

When armed attackers stormed the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris this week killing 12 people, there was an immediate outpouring of grief and outrage. Within hours of the attack, the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie (“I am Charlie” in French) began appearing on Twitter

A member of al-Qaeda’s offshoot branch in Yemen, known as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula or AQAP, told The Associated Press on Friday that the group directed the deadly attack on the French magazine Charlie Hebdo.

If a person chooses to identify as a Muslim, we do not question her identity because that is disrespectful, especially if we are not Muslims ourselves.

Was the recent murder of 12 people at Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical paper, an act of Islamic terror? Or was it just terror, without a religious or identity character? Beneath the simplistic binary claims that the act does not represent Muslims and Islam, or that Islam is to blame altogether, there lies a difficult and important dilemma: How should we refer to the identity of the perpetrators of this, and other similar acts of terror? Should we consider them Muslims or not?

In solidarity with the people killed in Paris, this illustration is accompanied by the caption, “Break one, thousand will rise,” as part of the #JeSuisCharlie hashtag. Many people and media outlets have been sharing this illustration by Lucille Clerc but incorrectly crediting Banksy.
Credit: Lucille Clerc License: All rights reserved..

On Friday, French security forces killed the two brothers — Cherif and Said Kouachi — suspected of murdering 12 people in an attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. The suspects were killed after an hours-long standoff with police near the Charles de Gaulle Airport.

Two brothers wanted in the attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris were killed Friday in a police raid on a building near the Charles de Gaulle airport. A third suspect, possibly connected to the brothers, was also killed in a separate raid after he held hostages at a kosher market in eastern Paris

BERLIN—While the attack on Charlie Hebdo sent shockwaves around the world, in Germany the news couldn’t have come at a worse moment. Presiding over the second-largest Muslim population in Western Europe, after France, Chancellor Angela Merkel has been trying to stamp out a populist uprising in the country’s east that is demanding an end to the “Islamization” of the West

After an hours-long standoff with French police near the Charles de Gaulle Airport outside Paris, the two brothers suspected of killing 12 people in the attack on the Charlie Hebdo magazine are dead, officials say. Another gunman who took multiple hostages at a kosher market in eastern Paris was also killed in a police raid. Police are still searching for a fourth suspect, a woman.